Hey, Wanna Ring The Opening Bell On Wall Street? Anybody?

Imagine you're a PR person representing a company that really needs some publicity for its latest corporate initiative. What better way than to trot out the execs to ring the opening bell at the NYSE or the Nasdaq? It's only like the least imaginative and most common financial PR tactic ever! But uh, what if your guy was scheduled to ring that bell some time during the last week, as Wall Street publicly crumbled to dust? Well now you see the problem we're facing here! Even celebrities are scared to ring the closing bell now. On Monday, when the market dropped almost 800 points:

The actress Missi Pyle, who appeared as the buxom alien Laliari in the cult hit “Galaxy Quest” and is currently on Broadway in the French farce “Boeing Boeing,” said on Tuesday that she had “decided to let the day be about the market and not about having a celebrity ring the bell.”

Ha, well at least she has a decent PR person. The stock exchanges themselves say to the Times, Oh yea dude, we still have like a ton of celebrities and athletes and executives who want to come ring our bell, no problemo. But one flack accurately calls it "a little bit like being asked to blow the foghorn on the Titanic." And the company that did ring the opening bell that terrible Monday? They're, uh, satisfied:

While chagrined at the day’s events, executives at Duff & Phelps take some heart that because of electrical glitches, the bell never actually rang on Monday. “We didn’t actually open the worst day in recent history,” said Marty Dauer, a spokesman for the company. “And that is fortuitous for us.”

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